Hartman: A return to the playoffs? Bengals are headed in the right direction

I walked out of Paul Brown Stadium on Thursday feeling much more optimistic than I would have expected to in January.

Maybe it’s just the time of year — no one has lost an NFL game since early February, and no one is going to lose one that matters for another 12 weeks or so — but it’s not hard to look at the 2018 Cincinnati Bengals and think good things could be in store.

New coordinator Teryl Austin could re-energize a bend-but-don’t-break defense, especially with the arrival of Jesse Bates, Preston Brown and Sam Hubbard along with the ascendance of William Jackson III, Carl Lawson and Nick Vigil.

That collective still won’t go far without much more help from the offensive line, but the addition of Cordy Glenn and Billy Price upgraded 40 percent of the line immediately, and the influence of new coach Frank Pollack might mean some of the holdovers (most notably Cedric Ogbuehi) figure out how to be contributors in this league.

With all those toys at his disposal, Bill Lazor should be able to make a big difference with his re-vamped offense, too, right?

Yeah, it’s June, but you don’t have to squint hard to see a team that had obvious limitations over the last two years now has fewer questions and more potential stars than it has since the 2015 season ended in misery.

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He fixed a broken team after he arrived in 2003 and two more times after that.

Not often does a coach get so many chances to remake a roster, but the Bengals are not your ordinary franchise, either.

Lewis is sort of like Jim Tressel in that he is often misunderstood, and that is generally because of his way of dealing with the media.

To quote the “Cool Hand Luke” line sampled by Guns N Roses: “This is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it!”

Cincinnati coach Marvin Lewis tells Bengals fans to stick with him and the team.

Of course, Tressel won a national championship in his second year at Ohio State then crippled Michigan for going on two decades by cutting the Wolverines’ recruiting base out from underneath them, so he got a lot more rope from fans.

If you keep the media at arm’s length, your image with the fans is likely to suffer sooner or later unless you win big. As Tressel learned when the NCAA came for him, no one on the local scene is coming to your defense when things go bad, either.